This policy has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow.

Feel free to propose any changes to this policy, but please make sure that changes you make follow the official process and reflect consensus on the discussion page before you put them into practice. Any big changes need to be Adopted or Decreed to be enforced as policy.

Editing at WoWWiki may be simple, but good editing is never simple. These are some tips to editing a good page in a way that works smoothly with other contributors. Also, you may want to see the see also section at the bottom of this page.

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However, one of the great advantages of the Wiki system is that incomplete or poorly written first drafts of articles can evolve into polished, presentable masterpieces throughout the process of collaborative editing. This gives our approach an advantage over other ways of producing similar end-products. Hence, the submission of rough drafts should be encouraged as much as possible.

One person can start an article with, perhaps, an overview or a few random facts. Another person can add a minority opinion. Someone else can round off the article with additional perspectives. Yet another can play up an angle that has been neglected, or reword the earlier opinions to a more neutral point of view. Another person might have facts and figures or a graphic to include and yet another might fix the spelling and grammatical errors that have crept in throughout these multiple edits.

As all this material is added, anyone may contribute and refactor to turn it into a more cohesive whole. Then, more text will be added; then, more refactoring and the article will gradually evolve ever closer to the ultimate final draft.

During this process, the article might look like a first draft—or worse, a random collection of notes and factoids. Rather than being horrified by this ugliness; we should rejoice in its potential and have faith that the editing process will turn it into brilliant prose. Of course, we don't have to like it; we may occasionally criticize really substandard work, in addition to simply correcting it. It is most important that it is corrected, if it can be corrected. For text that is beyond hope we will remove the offending article to the corresponding talk page, or, in cases in which the article obviously has no redeeming merit whatsoever, delete it outright. The latter action should not be taken lightly, however.

Generally, different people here have different editing "styles". Some people edit lightly and focus on contributing new content. Others prefer to improve and greatly expand existing "stubs" and articles. Some like to make relatively small copy-editing (such as grammar, spelling, clarification, and syntax) changes, as well as adding new links and moving pages (so as to rename them without losing history and talk).

These parts sum up to a much greater whole that is WoWWiki as we know it.

There are also different editing styles in the sense of how bold people are willing to be:

Virtually no one behaves as though previous authors need to be consulted before making changes; if we thought that, we'd make little progress.

Quite the contrary: some WoWWikians think you should not beat around the bush at all—simply change a page immediately if you see a problem, rather than waiting to discuss changes that you believe need to be made. Discussion becomes the last resort.

An intermediate viewpoint accords that dialogue should be respected, but at the same time a minor tweak should be accepted. In this view, to edit radically or not will often depend on the context—which seems reasonable enough.

With large proposed deletions or replacements, it may be best to suggest changes in a discussion, lest the original author be discouraged from posting again. One person's improvement is another's desecration, and nobody likes to see their work destroyed without warning.